Today I met this great guy, a fellow Bangladeshi by the name of Rashid Ali. He is a keen marathon runner and a bicyclist. He has raised money for various charities such as the children of Gaza and the Syrian crisis among others. He has ridden his bicycle throughout Europe to raise funds for these causes.

He is about to embark on his most challenging bicycle ride to date. Tomorrow, Saturday 30th June 2017 at 09:30 am British Summer Time he and a colleague will leave London's Olympic Park in Stratford and ride towards Paris. From Paris, they will continue on towards Istanbul in Turkey. From there he and his riding partner will ride to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, their final destination.

Their journey is 5,700km long and they intend to complete it in time to perform The Hajj Pilgrimage.

Their target is to raise money (£50,000, $63,000) for street children in Dhaka, Bangladesh and Pakistan as well as Syrian children affected by the six years of war.

He spoke to children who collect cans and bottles to sell to recyclers for money. Rashid spoke to a boy called Ramzan who is ten-years-old and earned Taka 100 (£1, $0.77) per day to feed himself and his two siblings.

Whilst speaking to Ramzan, Rashid saw that the boy was fidgeting. He asked why that was so. The boy replied that talking to Rashid was costing him time and money. He further explained that as the ferries and boats arrived at Sadharghat Port he was missing the opportunity to collect plastic bottles to sell.

Even though Ramzan and other children cannot feed themselves they kept dogs as pets, for fear of being robbed of their bottles and worse being abused and tortured by adults. The dogs protected them and their meagre possessions from unscrupulous predatory human traffickers, and pimps.

Rashid gave the boy Taka 200 (£2, $1..44) and asked him if he could continue interviewing him. He then asked Ramzan, what does he dream about. The boy replied, "I would like to experience the feeling of having a belly full of food, I've heard about it but never experienced it".

After the interview, Rashid took the boy and his siblings to a nearby cafe and fed them till they were content.

Rashid explained that after his bicycle ride he is planning to return to Dhaka, Bangladesh to open an orphanage and save as many of these children as he and his organisation can.

This is only one story of one boy there are millions like this not only in Bangladesh but throughout the world in countries where poverty is rife and others where war and violence have affected children the most.

You can follow Rashid Ali's ride on London2Makkah and donate if you wish. We may not be able to help every child that is suffering on this planet, but we can all do our little bit any which way we can.

What do you do when the chips are down? Do you keep rolling the dice? Or do you throw your hands up in the air and capitulate?

To yield to a difficult situation or an undesired outcome - in my view - is the cowards way out. Life does not owe anyone anything. Life is not waiting for you or me to ask for something and we will be graciously obliged. It is totally the opposite. Life will ask you to sweat, to squirm and you will be taken to the edge of a cliff face before handing out the reward we may have been asking for. Life will throw curveballs not once, not twice but multiple times in our lives. Life will throw a spanner into the works when we covered all our bases thinking nothing will go wrong. Yet things do go awry, again and again.

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it. ~ Maya Angelou

Just because our plans do not go accordingly do we stop and give up? Of course not. Giving up would mean that today we would not have the light bulb invented by Thomas Edison. Giving up would not have allowed Roger Bannister to break the four-minute mile, and others to have followed him to beat his time again and again. Giving up would mean homo sapiens not leaving Africa to populate the world.

Most of what we have to endure can be endured and as the old Persian Sufi saying goes, "This, too, shall pass", more often than not most of our worries do tend to pass. It is usually at the eleventh hour when a solution will arise, and it may come from the left field, from somewhere we had no inkling of an answer to materialise from.

Perseverance is failing 19 times and succeeding the 20th. ~ Julie Andrews

There will be naysayers who tell you to give up, there will be doubters who scoff behind your back and there will those who ridicule you in public. Critics for me are good for motivation. The more someone says I cannot do it, the more bloody-minded I become in my pursuit of what I have set out to do.

The path to the end result you seek may change. Adjusting the plans as you make progress is not the end of the world, it is a prerequisite of getting there. On my road trip to Bangladesh from England in 2005/06, my car or so I thought had died in the frozen high plateau of eastern Turkey. My friend and I panicked that our trip was over, he even considered getting on a plane and going back to England. It was not until we limped our car to a gas station, where the proprietor told us to sit, relax and after drinking steaming hot sweet Turkish tea he gave us the solution to get our car moving again. Our worst fears did not materialise and we were saved. Further along our journey in southern Iran, we had driven 12 hours and arrived at the wrong border crossing, running dangerously low on fuel we drove 500km back the way we had come and again the kindness of two Baluchi brothers saved our skin. What we did do was to keep moving forward and not losing sight of our end destination.

If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Success is the final evidence of the hours, days, weeks, months and even years slaving away quietly, chipping away at the seemingly insurmountable task at hand. Our society - globally - is obsessed with instant gratification, the immediate elixir to be drunk until the next fix. Yet few realise that it is those hours alone at practice, at work, at failing and trying again that results in the masterpiece of whatever we are aiming for.

A river cuts through rock, not because of its power, but because of its persistence. ~ Jim Watkins

What if my goal isn't right? I don't feel good about it and I want to change it? Your goal is your goal and if you want to change it, then change it. However, do think about not trying to flip-flop from one thing another. The key tenet is to 'keep rolling the dice' until the double six shows up. Most endeavours are a numbers game, it's all about how many times you pick up the phone and make those sales calls, it's how many times you knock on doors, it's how many times you take that practice shot. Eventually, you will hit the bullseye.

On that note, I would like to leave you with a quote by the 30th president of the United States of America, Calvin Coolidge.

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. ~ Calvin Coolidge

Courage is the stuff of legends. Courage is what our heroes and heroines have in abundance. They go where mortals fear to tread. Courage seems consigned to the movie screens and those men and women who serve in uniforms. In history and contemporary culture, courage is dominated by the physical demonstration of the character trait.

From deeds in religious scriptures to the knight in shining armour in fairy tales to war heroes and the action person in the movies. All of them sacrificing their wellbeing, throwing asunder their personal needs to serve those less able to defend themselves from evil and tyranny.

From stories like The Hobbit entertaining us with the bravery of Bilbo Baggins to Han Solo in Star Wars flying his Millenium Falcon carrying out a daring mission and Harry Potter facing up to his nemesis Lord Voldemort. We as children and adults alike are engrossed and inspired by such stories.

"I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear" — Nelson Mandela

Courage, however, is not merely manifested in physical feats of bravery. Courage has many facets, it is a kaleidoscope of colours, shades, and intensity of emotions. I am sure we all recall as teenagers having to pluck up the courage to ask that special person out on a date. How we felt the butterflies in our stomach, yet we felt strongly enough about that girl or boy to ask them out. If we see a car crash we would stop and help those in danger. When a natural disaster strikes people put their own lives at risk to save those trapped under damaged buildings, flooded vehicles or simply rescuing a child left in a car during a hot summers day.

Courage is so much more. Courage is the immigrants who decide to leave their homeland in search of a better life. Courage is the refugee who flees a war-torn country to shelter in a more safer environment. Courage is the parents' time immemorial doing their best to raise their children with whatever resources they have at their disposal. Courage is the visionary who risks financial ruin to start a business. Courage is limitless and is multi-faceted.

"And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” — Steve Jobs, Stanford commencement speech, June 2005

One form of courage that we see throughout history and even today is quite invisible in my view. It is the one that does not require great physical strength, it does not ask of us to jump into a burning building, but it requires something far more powerful from deep within us. It is the one form of courage that only we ourselves can hold us accountable for. I am talking about moral courage.

Traditionally we have identified moral courage with the giants of humanity who take up the gauntlet to bring about social justice. The likes of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi and Susan B. Anthony of the Suffragette Movement among numerous others. Yet, everyone on this planet of ours has and will face some kind of predicament multiple times throughout their lives when they will be challenged and their moral courage will be called for.

What do I mean by moral courage? It is the situation in life when we are faced with a wrongdoing. It is when we can speak up for an injustice, expose a lie or whistle-blow a cover up. When faced with such dilemmas we may not face immediate physical danger but it could lead to it eventually. If we speak up we may lose our jobs, be ostracised by our peers and ultimately could face death. If we don't speak up then we go away with a hollowness in our hearts that eats away at us, knowing fully well that we did not have the guts to stand up to an act or words that were clearly wrong.

"From caring comes courage." — Lao Tzu

Take bullying whether it be at school, workplace or in a less formal situation, do we stand up to the perpetrator or do we acquiesce to only feel terrible in our private company?

As a young teen at school, I've watched as bullies pushed, shoved and made fun of the kid that was meeker. I did nothing for fear of getting attacked by racist thugs on my way home. Yet, I felt terrible for days afterwards. School somehow seems to have carried on into the workplace. The same childish behaviour that happened in school seems to repeat at work. With it comes the wrongdoing in terms of a word said that hurts, an exclusion of an individual just because they do not fit the stereotype of the company's dominant culture. How many of us stand up to this behaviour?

"A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer." — Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

Even more damaging and dangerous is when there are cover-ups by leaders in society. The news media is rife with children being abused by the ones who hold high office in religion. Business is strewn with stories of deliberate oversight, take the 2008 financial crisis, banks knew they were selling junk mortgages to people who could not afford the repayment. Nick Leeson brought down Barings Bank, the UK's oldest merchant bank, having gambled away £827 million ($1.3 Billion) in 1995. Politics is filled with scandals, Bill Clinton and Nixon come to mind among multitudinous others.

Yet, there are brave souls who do speak up. Take Joseph M. Darby, the US military policeman who was stationed at Abu Ghraib. He reported the abuses there to US investigators in 2004. He received a Profile in Courage award in 2005. Currently, he lives with his family in protective military custody because of threats against them. Take Anna Politkovskaya a journalist and human rights activist, who was a vocal critic of Russian atrocities in Chechnya, and later of the Putin administration. She was shot dead in 2006. A few hired gunmen have been convicted, but the mastermind behind her murder is still at large.

"Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore." — Lord Chesterfield

We are currently seeing a dilemma in the United States of America, where the highest office in the land is held up for scrutiny. The lies, cover-ups and wrong doings in the White House are however being exposed by a few brave individuals. Leaks are exposing misdemeanours that could bring down the incumbent president. The individuals who are releasing snippets of collusion with the Russians, payments for influence and other potentially treasonous acts may themselves be breaking the law and could possibly face prison sentences. Yet they are braving the potential threat of incarceration to expose what is morally and ethically wrong and could harm the American people more than anything else. This is even more imperative when the whole world watches to the US as a beacon of law and justice. Because cowardice in the face of injustice and not standing up to what is wrong can tear us apart as individuals, teams, the fabric of society and entire nations.

One of my favourite stories of courage is that of a German Pastor during World War II. Martin Niemoller was an ardent anticommunist and a Nazi supporter. Yet when Hitler asserted the superiority of the state over religion, Niemoller stood up and began to oppose Hitler's declaration. Niemoller was imprisoned at Dachau concentration camp located 17 miles outside Munich in Germany. A place I have visited and even to this day causes the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up. He was released once the Americans liberated the camp in 1945. Niemoller's famous quote rings true today as it did over 70 years ago.

FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE SOCIALISTS, AND I DID NOT SPEAK OUT - BECAUSE I WAS NOT A SOCIALIST.

THEN THEY CAME FOR THE TRADE UNIONISTS, AND I DID NOT SPEAK OUT - BECAUSE I WAS NOT A TRADE UNIONIST.

THEN THEY CAME FOR THE JEWS, AND I DID NOT SPEAK OUT - BECAUSE I WAS NOT A JEW.